Postmenopausal acceleration of age-related mortality increase.

The force of natural selection to eliminate deleterious genes is attenuated with advancing age, allowing senescence to evolve. This suggests that a distinctly marked end of the reproduction period is likely to be followed by an acceleration of senescence. It is thus expected that menopause should trigger an acceleration of age-related mortality increase in human females. Such an abrupt initiation of mortality acceleration is not predicted for human males at the same ages, whose fecundity declines more gradually. Life table aging rate patterns for selected industrialized countries generally support this hypothesis. A cause-of-death decomposition analysis indicates that the sex differential in mortality acceleration is mainly due to cardiovascular diseases, which is consistent with the prevalent view that postmenopausal changes in the sex hormone status may affect lipoprotein metabolism, and in turn, raise the risk of arteriosclerosis.